Russia is in retreat

An eminently sensible article onthe Big Bad Bear from of all places...The Guardian!

A must read. Hopefully we'll be hearing more from Mark Almond on the subject


"What did you do during the new cold war? Blink and you missed it. On New Year's Day, Russia was an energy superpower with its icy grip around western Europe's gas pipes. Alarmist strategists reported that Moscow was on the march. Estonia or Poland may be in Nato and the EU, but they were perilously vulnerable to energy blackmail. The Russian president was portrayed as a judo blackbelt with a chess grandmaster's geostrategic grasp.

The murky Swiss-based arrangements for divvying up the compromise price agreed between Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled gas company, and its Ukrainian partners cannot disguise the reality that Russia lost out in the quarrel. The EU rallied against its major energy partner, and behind Washington."
Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Russia is in retreat

Russia is a dying nation who's one hope for survival is to cling to the West tenaciously. Instead, Putin stupidly attempts to work both sides of the street. One would think he would have actually learned something from the al Qaeda/Iranian sponsored atack on Nalchik last year....